George Bush, the Manchurian candidate

IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court, thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few decades, as only a few presidents have done before him. Instead, President Bush’s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to nominate a close colleague with no judicial track record for the Supreme Court, following an earlier uninspired choice, risks condemning his administration to being remembered as the most debilitating since the sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. There is no pleasure in recording this. This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.

The importance of senior judicial nominations cannot be understated in American politics. There are only nine justices on the Supreme Court and they serve for life. Last month’s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor was a unique opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right, completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted under President Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr Bush’s conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies were an opportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the unconstitutional judicial activism which has dominated the Court since the Roosevelt years. Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has blown it: instead of the conservative intellectual jurists that his supporters had the right to expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre John Roberts, a moderate conservative with an undistinguished legal track record, the new Chief Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for the O’Connor vacancy. The Roberts appointment is not a disaster, though it shows a poverty of imagination. But the Miers nomination is pure cronyism. There are supposedly 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States, the most judicially-obsessed country on earth (no doubt there are already even more since that last count); out of this 1m-strong universe, Ms Miers would not make the shortlist of even the top 5,000. She has been nominated because she is a close confidante of the President, a former staff secretary, personal lawyer and currently White House counsel.

This is a missed opportunity of historic proportions. The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America’s lesser courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change, for which Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from school bussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most recently the powers of the President versus those of Congress in times of war). An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in June illustrates its power and the controversial nature of its decisions: it ruled five to four that local governments could force property owners to sell their homes to private developers whenever officials decide it would “benefit the public”, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed. So, a new supermarket that wants to bulldoze local homes to expand its car park can now do so if it can convince local politicians (whose campaigns it might have bankrolled) to claim that this is somehow in the public interest, thus ensuring that homeowners are summarily kicked out; even the French would not give the state this amount of power.

It is this kind of controversial activism that conservatives, both radical and moderate, were hoping Mr Bush would put an end to through his judicial appointments. The liberal-left in the Senate, which can block Supreme Court nominations, was gearing up for a last-ditch battle to stop the President packing the court with right-wingers; the American Right, which has spent the past three decades waiting for this moment, was ready to seize the moment. For both sides these appointments were to be the mother of all battles in America’s Kulturkampf war, the final and most important showdown for the heart and soul of America, making last year’s bitter Bush-Kerry election look like a sideshow. So, when it became apparent that the President had ducked a fight, not once but twice, by appointing relative unknowns to the bench, with no real guarantee of any ideological commitment, an uncontrolled rage overcame the US conservative movement last week.

They were already furious at the President’s incompetent selling of his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the collapse of his plans for major tax reforms through White House neglect; they have watched in despair as the President’s upbeat rhetoric in Iraq was confounded regularly by tragic events, including an appalling American death toll and a neo-con mission clearly adrift; those who fought the good fight to restrain government in the Reagan years stood by in disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic spending faster than at any time since President Johnson’s Great Society; and the nativist right is increasingly and dangerously surly at what it views as the President’s failure to tackle illegal immigration and secure the country’s borders. This litany of failure, in the eyes of the president’s natural constituencies, was bad enough. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which crystallised what even conservative Americans had been thinking about their president and opened the flood gates, not just in New Orleans but on the President himself.

His presidency is unlikely to recover, as The Business pointed out at the time. Of course, Mr Bush is not the only one to blame for the country’s inadequate reaction to Katrina; but given the scale of the natural disaster, the buck was always going to stop with him. As far as most Americans were concerned, it did: suddenly they saw the same incompetence of a commander-in-chief who had created a deadly quagmire in Iraq played out in the streets of one of their own cities. A president who, whatever his other shortcomings, had claimed leadership skills and competent administration was stripped bare. It was not a pretty sight and the response to his political plight was typically Bush: he announced his intention to throw a massive $200bn into reconstructing New Orleans. This merely completed Mr Bush’s demise among America’s wisest conservatives, who have always regarded his big-government conservatism as the greatest betrayal of all. Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.

The American Right is still in the ascendant but is now faction-ridden, disillusioned and keener to take chunks out of itself than the opposition – much like the old left. Fashionable commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have started gleefully to predict its demise. But even Mr Bush’s cackhanded incompetence might not manage that. Powerful forces continue to nudge America to the right, whatever the inadequacies of the current Republican leadership. The GOP is extending its advantage with evangelical Protestants to Catholics and gradually loosening the Democrats’ stranglehold over Hispanics and Asian-Americans, the country’s fastest-growing minorities. Conservative sentiment is strongest in those parts of America where the population is growing fastest – especially the vast suburbs and “exburbs” of the South and West – while areas where the Democrats are strongest are losing people and influence. Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they want to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle, especially given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which is increasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of fresh or stimulating ideas.

The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in modern Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping to explain the country’s exceptionalism and its growing cultural divergence with Europe. The damning charge against Mr Bush is that, instead of using the continued dominance of the right to finish the large amounts of uncompleted business from the Reagan revolution – sorting out the social security system, simplifying the tax code, tackling America’s abysmal primary and secondary schools, reforming corporate welfare with the same gusto as welfare for the poor was reformed, forging a new consensus to wage the war or terror – Mr Bush has failed in all these areas, and in some has taken America backwards.

There is now a distinctive fin de regime stink about Republican Washington. Karl Rove, the President’s eminence grise, has been called to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The cronyism of Ms Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court is now the rule in DC, not the exception: for example, Julie Myers, another inexperienced Bush lawyer, has been nominated to run the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has no convincing qualifications for this post, a vital one in an age of terror; but she is the niece of retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and the wife of the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s chief of staff. This is worrying: the inadequate response to Katrina was not because of supposed federal budget cuts – an absurd criticism given how spending has ballooned during the Bush years – but more because the Federal Emergency Management Agency was crammed with incompetent cronies.

Then there is the case of Tom DeLay. The Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives since 2002 has been indicted with “conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme” and charges of conspiring to launder money. He has been forced to step down from his job as majority leader until the matter is resolved. Republicans claim the charges are politically-motivated and should be thrown out – Ronnie Earle, the Travis County District Attorney who has brought the indictments, is a Democrat – but even if Mr DeLay is cleared, the once fresh-faced Republicans who were ushered in on the tail coats of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994 now look tired and complacent.

President Bush and his entourage are cultural conservatives, rather than radicals in the mould of Reagan, who was driven by his belief that freeing individuals and liberating the economy would produce a new and better society. The attitudes of Team Bush are driven more by upbringing, emotion and simple religious faith rather than an intellectual belief in the superiority of private action and the market economy. Instead of completing the Reagan revolution, which should have been Mr Bush’s historic mission, he is dangerously close to wrecking it. If the Republicans go down to defeat in the mid-term elections of 2006 and the presidential election of 2008, they will have only themselves to blame. But it is ordinary Americans who will pay the price for Mr Bush’s numerous follies.

I wouldn't call John Roberts an "uninspired choice." These editorialists did not interview Roberts in the oval office. Bush knows his views extremely well at this point. A man like Roberts is not going to lie to the President in an interview in the oval office.

And neither do we. All Republican Senators voted for Ruth Vader Ginsberg. GW nominated Harriet Miers and she will be confirmed. That's the truth of it. Get over it.

There are supposedly 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States, the most judicially-obsessed country on earth (no doubt there are already even more since that last count); out of this 1m-strong universe, Ms Miers would not make the shortlist of even the top 5,000. She has been nominated because she is a close confidante of the President, a former staff secretary, personal lawyer and currently White House counsel.

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The Tories need to clean up their own act. They have been in the wilderness since they pushed Maggie Thatcher over the side, and there are no signs yet that they have found a decent leader.

Okay, now Roberts is mediocre? I guess that's why Dubya made two attempts trying to get him on the DC Circuit. I guess that's why Poppy tried to get him on the DC Circuit in 1992. Seems like an awful lot of respect to pay a mediocrity, don't you think?

I wouldn't call John Roberts an "uninspired choice."

This is taking a swipe at Conservatives and Republicans.

This screed seems to mention the SCOTUS nominees in passing (characterizing recklessly Roberts and Miers as seemingly two peas in the same pod) as a launch pad for a jihad against Bush for wrecking the Reagan revolution, and is not bothered with many specifics. Just what was the Reagan revolution, and just how is Bush wrecking it? Reagan and Bush both didn't mind spending money to grease the political wheels, both were into deficits and tax cuts (well Reagan largely reversed his, and Bush hasn't reversed his but whatever), and both were strong on defense, and both favored or favor in effect immigration amnesties. The only thing I can see Bush wrecked was Reagan's gift for communication, which Bush does not have, and never did, and never will.

Grow up. Your insipid name calling is embarrassing. If you don't like George Bush you're free to say so. But this isn't third grade recess, calling good people 'Bushbots' is childish, uncalled for and beneath the dignity of a real Freeper.

Oh also, the author didn't live up to his Manchurian candidate headline. Who is the man or woman or evil organization behind the curtain pulling the Bush sockpuppet strings? The theme of the headline is totally absent from the ensuing text.

I expect Harriet to get on the court and then proceed to kick the crap out of liberal elitists. She and Roberts will refuse to create special rights to gay marraige and abortion at any time for any female at any age. These special rights do not exist in our constitution and these two will refuse to amend our contstitution by judical decree.

I suspected that the Roberts slight would draw particular notice, and I disagree with that point as well. Roberts was in fact an inspired choice, and is eminently qualified for the position in my view. Now, whether he is the ideological rock that one might wish him to be is another matter altogether. I think it's the latter that induces the comment, because as I've said from the beginning, Roberts is in fact a tabula rasa on far too many issues. A very brilliant tabula rasa, but a tabula rasa nonetheless.

"But this isn't third grade recess, calling good people 'Bushbots' is childish, uncalled for and beneath the dignity of a real Freeper."

Well said. S/he's only been a Freeper for a month. I say a trip to the woodshed is in order!

You can bet your last chips in a game of Texas hold-em that neither John nor Harriet are a tabula rasa to George W. Bush. I'm sure at this point he's very skilled at interviewing people and going straight to the key issues he's concerned about.

"These special rights do not exist in our constitution and these two will refuse to amend our contstitution by judical decree."

FWIW, I agree, Carl. I totally agree. :)

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